From an early age, we talk to
people about the positive and negative influences of peer pressure. On the negative side, drug education programs
talk about the effect of social groups on whether a particular individual will
take drugs. On the positive side,
Austin, Texas has a highly successful day of giving in which members of the
community urge others to donate to their favorite charities.
But, how much influence do you
really have on the actions of other people?
Are you aware of the effect you have on others?
This issue was explored in an
interesting paper by Vanessa Bohns, Mahdi Roghanizad, and Amy Xu in the March,
2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
This paper focused on peer
pressure to do negative things. In one
study, participants were college students.
They went on campus and asked other students to commit a white lie. They were asked to approach other students
and ask them to sign a sheet acknowledging that the participant had described a
new class at the university to them, even though the participant was not going
to describe the class because he/she “didn’t really want to do it.”
Before starting this task,
participants estimated how many people they would have to ask in order to get
three students to sign the forms. They
also asked people how comfortable others would be in saying “no” to the
request. Then, they went out and
solicited white lies.
Participants predicted they would
have to ask an average of 8.5 people in order to get three signatures. In fact, they only had to ask an average of
4.4 participants in order to get those three signatures. Generally speaking, people felt that others would
be comfortable saying “no” to them. The
more comfortable they thought others would be saying “no,” the more people they
thought they would have to task before getting the required signatures.
A second study replicated this
finding using a situation in which participants asked others to write the word
“pickle” in a library book in pen. Once
again, participants believed they would have to task twice as many people to
get three people to commit the small act of vandalism as they actually did need
to ask.
Two other studies looked at why
this effect emerged. These studies used
vignettes in which people imagined small unethical acts like reading someone’s
private Facebook messages if their account was left open or calling in sick to
work in order to go to a baseball game.
Some people read scenarios in
which they were going to perform the act themselves. Others read scenarios in which they were
watching someone else performing the act and they could give them advice. In one situation, the advice was either to do
the unethical thing or the ethical thing.
Participants rated how comfortable they would feel doing the ethical
thing in these scenarios.
Participants who played the role
of advisor did not feel their advice would have much impact on others. They felt that other people would be
reasonably willing to do the ethical thing whether they were giving other
people advice to do the right thing or to do the unethical thing.
In fact, though, participants
playing the role of the actor were much less comfortable doing the ethical
thing when they got advice to do the unethical thing than when they got advice
to do the ethical thing. That is, people
were highly swayed to do the wrong thing by the advice they got.
Other studies by Vanessa Bohns and
her colleagues have demonstrated similar findings looking at ethical
behavior.
Putting all of this work together,
then, it seems that we have a hard time saying “no” to other people. Social pressure has a huge influence on our
behavior. At some level, that may not seem
surprising to us, but we systematically underestimate the influence that our
social pressure has on other people.
One more reason why we should try
to help other people to do the right thing.
